Skip to main content
Breakfast

Lamb Hash

A dish of cold cooked lamb mixed with butter, flour, milk, spices, served on toasted bread topped with poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lamb Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt butter and flour without frying.

  2. Add milk and stir until boiling.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix in salt, cayenne, onion juice, and lamb.

  2. Add nutmeg and spread mixture on rounds of toasted bread.

  3. Top each round with a poached egg and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cold cooked lamb
Provides the main meat and bulk of the hash.
Butter and flour
Form a roux that thickens the milk into a smooth sauce.
Milk
Liquid base that turns the roux into a creamy binding sauce.
Poached eggs
Add richness and a soft, runny yolk that moistens the hash.

The step that matters

Melting butter and flour without frying. Cooking the roux gently keeps it pale and free of browned, toasty flavour, and stirring prevents lumps. Letting it colour or stopping stirring risks a grainy, uneven sauce that will not thicken smoothly when the milk is added.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, butter, flour, milk, pepper, nutmeg, bread):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, butter, flour, milk, pepper, nutmeg, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Rice GruelRice Gruel28 recipesPeptoned Milk GruelPeptoned Milk Gruel9 recipes